There is nothing in this world more frustrating than feeling devalued. If you’re a mom, chances are you’ve been told at some point, “You really need to relax.”
I’ve heard this happen a few times (luckily it doesn’t happen that often) and it annoys me to the point of madness, and I can never quite explain why. But in a recent TikTok from creator Paige — who posts about mental load, parenting, parenting, and marriage as @sheisapaigeturner — Perfect Expressing this sentiment is absolutely infuriating for a reason.
She began by describing a situation that many of us are familiar with: the “default parent” situation. The person who manages the kids’ appointments, lunches, backpacks, organizes family trips, and generally manages everyone’s schedules and supplies. She explains that for someone who is told to “relax” or “relax,” it “is dismissive of all the work, time, and energy that goes into all of these things.
“When you are responsible for planning, tidying up and executing many things in the house and your partner just goes along with it, they can’t seem to recognize why you might be stressed, which is so frustrating because you can feel ignored. You It can be felt that the labor that you are doing, the invisible labor, the mental load, all of it is completely ignored…if you stop stressing, if you calm down, if you relax, if you don’t worry, everything. All can fall apart. You may also understand the consequences of not doing the work beforehand, so you understand that ‘pressure’ and ‘don’t relax’ until something is truly valuable. Because all you do is save yourself time.
“It’s incredibly dismissive,” she continued, “that your partner comes to you and just tells you to calm down because everything is going to go well, and they’re not the ones responsible for making sure things go well.”
So, okay, this can put the other partner in a bind: They see their partner is stressed, but they don’t realize it think They are. How do they move forward in this regard? It’s actually very simple: ask yourself Why First, you are not involved in anything that causes her stress, what can you do to reduce her stress. If you can’t or won’t do that, the least you can do (like, absolutely at least) is let her do the task in her own way, since she obviously knows best.
The comment is Full People (almost all of whom seem to be women) see themselves in this hypothetical story.
“Tell him, okay, I’m going to relax and you handle Thanksgiving or birthdays or whatever comes next,” one commenter mused. “Beware of disaster.”
“[My partner] Always telling me I need to pick up hobbies…while he goes to the gym for two hours 4 days a week, plays games, works full time and we have two kids and a house that always needs cleaning,” another said gloomily and dejectedly.
A third person recalled that the line was absolutely perfect:
“My husband once said, ‘You know me, I go with the flow.’ I looked at him and said, ‘I am the flow.
So, true friends—and, let’s be honest: We’re talking about men here #NotAllMen, but deep down, you know who you are—next time you feel like telling your partner to calm down, Take a moment to consider that maybe she could do it if she had more help.
